Following the 2012 Coup and de facto secession of the Northern part of the country with large displacement issues, Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team is investigating activities to map Mali (Pre-Activation)

For more long term mapping and Mali OSM community news, see the WikiProject Mali page

Information about this activation

History of this intervention

April 2012 : Following the military coup in Bamako and the de-facto secession, the HOT contributors started to monitor the situation, to look for imagery and map various areas.

Dec 2012 : Following the resurgence of violence, contributors collaboration was re-activated.

Jan 2013 : At the request of UNOCHA-Mali and the humanitarian organizations, HOT formally activated for this humanitarian response, intensifying mapping and coordinating with UNOCHA-Mali and various humanitarian clusters providing aid in sectors such as water and sanitation, education, etc.

Coordination

Pierre Béland and Frédéric Bonifas are coordinating this activation. For moer information, you can reach the coordinators by email at activation.mali@hotosm.org.

For discussions or help for mapping, you can reach the coordinators and collaborators on the irc://irc.oftc.net #hot.

Support Team

HOT activation in Mali covers a large territory and involve various activities in coordination with the humanitarian stakeholders. It requires the participation of many collaborators. Many contributors are supporting this activation through remote mapping with the OSM Tasking Manager to coordinate these efforts. Support team members are also doing various jobs such as find the necessary imagery, mount an imagery server, analyze / validate the database and various data files, geolocate Public services POI's, classify road network and support other mappers.

It is important to coordinate our efforts. You should not contact stakeholders in the name of HOT without the approval of the coordinators.

The following Support team contributors participate intensively to this activation, supporting the coordinators with various activities. They can be reached on the irc://irc.oftc.net #hot.

AndrewBuck

bremy

jgc

PovAddict

TomT5454

Discussions with humanitarians - Chat logs

There are ongoing weekly chats with the humanitarian workers in Mali regarding our collaboration with them in mapping for the crisis. Pre meeting agendas and logs of these chats are available on the pages below:

Documentation from UNOCHA and the humanitarian clusters

Experimentation of Crowdsourcing Image Recognition - 2013-02

It is often difficult to spot villages in the vast semi-desert landscape of Northern Mali. To progress more rapidly and ensure we spot all villages, user nicolas17 proposed and developed "Kuona", the Crowdsource Image Recognition application. Others have contributed to develop this application and incorporate the results into the Task Manager with a new approach. The task squares are not contiguous. They are determined by the result of the Crowdsourcing application. After one week of development, this seems very interesting for the future and we will surely continue to develop this concept.

Task Manager job 198 : PierreG has hacked the Task Manager with this Experimental micro-tasking using the Result of Kuona as input.

Image collection

We use Bing High-res imagery when this is available. Extensive areas are covered. For others, we are discussing to obtain imagery. We also look for imagery to better identify the zones exposed to annual flooding

How you can contribute to this activation

Our goal is to contribute to humanitarian relief by providing a base map of Mali including the road network, the villages and the public services. This facilitates delivery of goods and services by the humanitarian organizations and assure that remote villages are monitored properly.

People with knowledge of the country are using OpenStreetBugs, a simple application to add or correct on the map information about various public services (ie. schools, health services, dams, water wells) or other significant infos about infrastructures. You comment the Reports already on the map or you add a Report to provide information. Experienced mappers will later treat this information and add to the map or correct the content.

You are more experienced and want to contribute by editing the OSM database

Tagging Instructions for contributors that trace from Satellite Imagery

Tagging standards may be different that what you've traditionally tagged in OSM. Read the Mali Tagging Page to find help you identify and consistently tag features found in Mali.

Crowdmapping : You contribute by selecting a micro-task from our Task Manager

Priority areas to map
The Task Manager jobs for Mali coordinates mappers working similarly to map various priority areas. For each job, a grid on a map divides the zone to map in micro-tasks that can be realized in an hour or two. The contributor selects a square area to map, edit in Potlatch2, JOSM or other OSM editors, and comes back to the Task manager to confirm that he completed the task. If he cannot complete, he simply unlock the task. This way, this micro-task can be completed later. Detailed instructions are given for each Job in the Workflow panel.

Verify the result of the Crowdsource appl. in JOSM

Experienced mappers can download the Result file of the Crowdsource applicaton (GPX file) (source: Harry Wood). In JOSM, the x characters indicate where houses, villages and dams have been reported. This should not be imported in OSM but only used as a reference layer to detect rapidly the residential areas. Editors using this file should coordinate on the #hot irc to avoid duplication of efforts. If you right click on the loaded gpx layer you can change the color of the x markers from the default grey to something more visible, like bright red. Also, a handy way to quickly work these points is to zoom out so you can see quite a few, press z to select the zoom tool and drag a small box around one to trace, then press the 8 key on your keyboard to jump back to your previous zoom and repeat the process.

Import various databases, Basic Services Utilities POIs

Various informations are necessary to complete the basic OSM map. We have various data files to geolocate such as populated places and public services (ie. health services, schools, water points, public and religious buildings). We generally discuss about these topics on the #hot irc and various contributors take responsability to geolocate these files.

We also coordinate with OCHA trying to improve this information.

Support from the local community and from humanitarians would also be very appreciated about this.

Road Network : Retrace major roads to assure that they are aligned with Bing Imagery

Humanitarian logistic to deliver goods and services requires to identify rapidly the major infrastructures. To respond to the two priorities identified below, experience OSM mappers are invited to look at major roads that may be used by the humanitarians NGO's traveling from neighborhood countries and across various parts of Mali.

To coordinate with other mappers, each contributor indicates below the road no. he is working on. Be careful to add bridges over the rivers and streams. When you have completed a road, confirm it in the comment column below. Indicate also portions of the road where no Bing imagery was available.

Bing Imagery shows hundred of flooded islands in the Upper Niger Delta during rainy season. These should be tagged as islands. Relations are to be created with riverbanks (role=outer) and islands (role=inner). Residential areas are also to be traced.

Resources

Imagery

Please indicate here any Imagery that can be used to map Mali.

High resolution Bing imagery was first limited to the cities of Timbuktu and Bamako. In june 2012, many other areas start to be added. In many areas (see east of San as example), we see large portions of the territory that correspond to water at low levels of zoom and flooded areas at high level of zooms. Other imageries like Orbview show farmlands in these areas. These flooded areas during rainy season should be remapped. The riverbank and islands should be traced correspondingly to the new Bing highres imagery. Observe farmlands and residential areas showed at high zoom levels. Large proportions of the territory in the Inner Niger Delta around Mopti and along the Niger River are under water during this season.

For JOSM: tms[19]:http://osm.arkemie.org/cgi-bin/tiles/1.0.0/mali/{zoom}/{x}/{y}

For Potlach: http://osm.arkemie.org/cgi-bin/tiles/1.0.0/mali/$z/$x/$y

They were processed at level L1Gst by USGS, and have less than 10% cloud cover. Like for Bing, the usual warning about adjusting the offset with GPS tracks before tracing from imagery applies.

Each scene covers about 200 square kilometers. When there is an overlap, the most recent image goes on top. In case of overlap between pan and ms images, pan images, which have better resolution, go on top. If you wish to access ms images anyway, they are also available in their own layer: replace "mali" with "mali_ms" in the above URLs.